HuckABuck is a new meta-search engine with the twist that it co-mingles results from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Technorati, Digg, and Delicio.us - and lets you adjust the priorities among those engines. One would assume other engines would be added eventually.

This is far from the first meta-search engine or twist on the idea. But it reminded me of a trend that I think is one of the most important in search, and yet doesn't get a lot of mindshare amidst the Google Algo Updates and link-spam discussions.

In the video world, the fall of the 'Big 3' has been exhaustively discussed under the 'tag' Exploding Television. In search, I think we're similarly coming out of the era of giants, but the fact has been obscured by the fact that the giants themselves are still growing unlike in the TV world where they were shrinking rapidly.

Google and the other engines themselves are contributors, with the 'invisible' tab splitting search into web|images|news|shopping|blogs etc. Vertical search engines such as those which have appeared in shopping, jobs, travel, weblogs, and other areas are another important component. Desktop widgets, toolbars (some of which aren't from the search giants), search built into the operating system, and a wide range of other solutions continue the fragmentation.

UPDATE: Blake from Huckabuck left a comment that pointed out perhaps the most dramatic explosion - personalized customized search. If each persons results are based on their past history, preferences, social network affiliations, or whatever, then the concept of being #1 on Google is really shot.

This is important to the online marketer because just as Tide can no longer 'talk to america' with 30-seconds on the evening news, you can no longer 'reach your market' by ranking #1 on Google. You've got to figure out everywhere that your category, brand, and company might be looked for and get yourself ranked and positioned in as many of those places as you can. This dramatically changes the nature of the task and of the resources you should put against it.

In practice many people don't even think about search in terms of the 'Big 3' but rather just focus on Google and take what they get from Yahoo and MSN. But it's time to re-define search to include all starting points and put the engines in proper perspective. Yes they drive the majority of traffic now, but as the shopping and travel verticals have seen it takes only 2-3 years for the 2ndary sources to become very significant.

There are several other important implications to this trend, which I'll comment on in future posts. Leave your thoughts on 'exploding search' in the comments.

[via Seth Godin]

UPDATE: The Huckabuck guys posted their own response and comments on the issues raised here over in their own blog.